The Data-Driven Classroom
I am still jazzed by the techno-pitchman’s hype last week about clickers, assessment, and SLOs, and I know clickers are the future of edubiz! Clickers generate tsunamis of admin’s holy grail—data! With data I can prepare reports and quantify learning to show that I’m accountable.
I went right to work, making a PowerPoint of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” embedding slides to measure student learning of the concepts. This way I can build a data bridge from my students’ clicker responses to bar graphs and data reservoirs. Crunching the data even shows the accreditation Cylons just how effective (but perpetually improving!) my methodologies and pedagogies are in producing the feedback loop of capability enhancement and desirable outcome consequentialities. God, I love being a teacher!
Now to ze text:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
I ripped “P-Frock” off the Net (whoops, no epigraph on this one but I’ll add a link to Dante). WTF? An entire stanza is missing! Data entry malfunction—and there are formatting problems and mis-transcriptions. Better hyperlink “etherised” to Wikipedia so students can learn about anaesthics, their development and use in care facilities; ditto British spelling. And link to “simile.”
Time for an assessment slide to see if students are getting the concepts.
QUESTION: Eliot employs figures of speech. Name two.
- Miscegenation
- Tropospheric hegemony
- Simile
- Smiley
- Jane Smiley
- Anthropomorphism
- Anthropogenic global warming
- a and d
- c and e
- e and e
I’ll have them click, then discuss with their peeps, then click again. Then I’ll have data and I can grok if my students are getting the concept!
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Yikes! Better link “women” to the Women’s Studies Program. Add another hyperlink to “Michelangelo” and Google images of David, the Sistine Chapel, The Thinker (wait, is that Michelangelo? The Thinker).
Dang, only 18 stanzas to go! I am so teaching now!
Yes, with clickers “I can grok if my students are getting the concept!” Sure, there are other ways to obtain in-class, formative assessment of student learning, but clickers work very well for this (better than, say, a show of hands where students don’t respond independently of each other) and scale up well to larger classes.
More importantly, instructors can use them to engage students during class. Instead of hearing from just a handful of students in response to a question, each and every student can be expected to respond. This means more students are thinking about the question and more are prepared to contribute to the discussion that follows.
The data on student learning they generate is a side benefit. Sure, administrators might want to see it, but instructors can also draw on that data to improve their teaching over time.
I’m not sure what hyperlinking words has to do with teaching with clickers, but I’ll point out that the example clicker question in this post is not half bad. Having students apply their understanding of various figures of speech is a great way for them to check and refine their understanding. Plus, the ambiguous nature of the responses (sure, someone might vote for simile, but does that mean they know which phrase is the simile?) means that the question is likely to generate productive discussion after the results are in.
I have used these clickers in classes before (I am a student), and so far they have been largely useless. They were mostly used to get a “polling” of the students’s responses to questions dealing with political and economic matters and were not even used to compile data, but merely as a hollow exercise. The times I’ve seen them in use in a more assertive way have also seemed to offer no good to the learning process. It seems more time is wasted handing out the clickers, compiling data, observing data, and then collecting up clickers that could otherwise be used to have lecture, discussion, or other, more conventional activities. I understand that many technologies exist to add more utility and efficiency to our lives, but I’ve seen some in the classrooms that tend to be more of a hindrance.
@Derek: I think you miss the core message of the post, which is to show the bulk of activities that schools and students are spending on obtaining raw data and flying around reading quick Wiki pages and digesting shallow poll results, as opposed to instructing and evaluating the depth of a subject to arrive at a clear result of knowledge for the students.
No, I got the core message of the post. I was just trying to be polite and positive. I objected to the characterization of clickers presented in the post. Many college and university faculty use clickers because they are genuinely interested in surfacing and addressing student misconceptions and misunderstandings–and in engaging more students in more meaningful ways during class–not because they’re trying to generate reams of data for administrators.
I’m sorry to hear that wasn’t your experience as a student using clickers. However, as with any instructional technology, the impact of the technology depends on the teaching choices that instructors make.